A few days ago, The Irish Times published a list of board games to buy for your family this Christmas, and the suggestions ranged from awful, to uninspiring, to dull, and back again. The real injustice here is that modern board gaming is incredible. The board gaming industry is in the middle of a renaissance and every year, more and more exciting, accessible, dynamic and interactive game are released! There's no reason to stick with stodgy old-fashioned games like Monopoly or Scrabble, or to play low-quality cash-grabs like the Strictly Come Dancing Board Game.

Here are some suggestions for games to play this Christmas, which won't end in you wishing you'd just watched telly instead!

You can find most of these through online retailers (like Amazon), or by contacting local board game retailers.

Timeline

Throw out Trivial Pursuit! Timeline is one of the best trivia games going. Rather than having to remember obscure football facts from the 1980s, Timeline asks you to guess when certain historical events happened. And the key word here is guess - you don't have to be right to win, just right enough! Each time a card is played, it moves into a position relative to other cards on the table. So the moon landing happened after D-Day. Your next card says "invention of the bicycle" and you just need to figure out where it goes relative to those other two. Super clever, super accessible, and also only costs about a tenner.

Cryptid

If you like deduction games like Cluedo, Cryptid is the perfect update to that genre. Players are racing to discover a mythical creature on a landscape made of hexagons. Each player has a clue, which by itself is not enough to find out which hexagon the creature lives on - maybe their clue is, the creature is within one space of water. But when all players combine their clues, only one hexagon will remain. The first player to figure it out wins the game, which means you'll be trying to hide your clues from everybody else! This game will really get you thinking!

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective

One more game about deduction, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is like a choose-your-own-adventure game, but made for larger groups to play in a couple of hours. Over the course of each game, players will be cooperatively racing to solve a crime, interviewing suspects, consulting maps, assessing evidence. By the end, you'll feel like crime-solving geniuses or a crowd of dimwits, but either way you'll have had a lot of fun getting there!

Forbidden Island

Another cooperative title, where players try to defeat the game rather than each other. In Forbidden Island, players are racing around an island to collect ancient artifacts and return to the helipad before the island sinks into the sea. As more and more pieces fall away, things get really tense. The cooperative nature makes this perfect for families to play together and especially if some younger kids struggle with competitive games. If you like the sound of this, you can also look at Pandemic - a slightly more complex game in a similar style.

Rhino Hero

Rhino Hero is like Jenga, but instead of removing wooden blocks, players are adding floors to a cute skyscraper made of cards. Some cards will insist that they also have to move a little rhino superhero too, which is incredibly nerve-wracking. The slightest nudge will cause the whole tower to collapse. This game never fails to evoke giggles from everyone playing!

Ticket to Ride

Big, bright, easy to learn, but with lots of fun strategy and interaction. Ticket to Ride has you creating train routes between cities, according to the secret objectives on your cards. Blocking other players is the key to victory, so bring your A-game! Ticket to Ride packs a full game experience in about an hour, so you can stop dreading the never-ending game of Monopoly that often takes up Christmas Eve.

There are a few editions out there, but I suggest getting Ticket to Ride: Europe.

Codenames

A word association game that gets you thinking and puzzling and bluffing. The nice thing about Codenames is that it pitches two teams of players against each other, so it can quite easily handle ten players without getting too long or complex.

Bohnanza

A bit of an older game, but if you like the trading aspect of Monopoly, you'll love Bohnanza. Weirdly, players are bean farmers, trying to harvest the best fields of beans. I know, it sounds stupid. But some very simple twists in the rules mean that you cannot win unless you're willing to strike up some good deals, time your moves, and hoard "stink beans". I really recommend Bohnanza, especially for families with older kids, but you might want to seek out a how-to-play video online - the rules that come in the box are a bit hard to parse.

King of Tokyo

This is Yahtzee, but waaaaay better! Players are giant monsters in Tokyo city, battling to be the biggest and best. They do this by rolling dice and trying to get dice combos, which give them attack powers, points, energy and health. If a player is feeling tough, they can position themselves as the King (or Queen) of Tokyo, earning a bunch of points, but becoming an easy target for other players too. The theme really helps elevate this game and players pushing-their-luck leads to a lot of laughs.

Movable Type

Alright, this is a game that I designed, but if you're a fan of Scrabble or other word games, it might be perfect for you. Rather than just getting dealt a bunch of letters, players pick their letters - do they want to take all the vowels, denying their opponents, or just go for high scoring letters, in the hopes that they can string them together? The biggest twist is in how the game is scored and won. Rather than keeping track of a score all the time, players earn letters into a score-pile each round. And then in the final round, players pick up their score piles and try to play words from them. It is the value of only this final word that counts when picking a winner, meaning the game is tense right up until the very end! (buy it here!)

Blank

This super simple Irish-designed card game feels a little bit like Uno, but with one incredible twist: at the end of every game, the winner gets to take one of the blank cards and write a new rule on it, to use in the next game. In time, you'll have a game that evolves to reflect you and your family, the games you've played and decisions you've made. It'll be a game to treasure.

The Mind

This is a very unusual game where players are trying to read each other's minds in order to cooperatively play a set of cards in a specific sequence. It needs to be played to be understood, as there really isn't anything else like it in the market. One nice thing about The Mind is that players aren't allowed to talk while they play, so if you're craving some peace and quiet after a busy Christmas morning, this might be the answer!

Barenpark

This game combines the feel of Tetris with a super-cute theme, having players constructing and managing their own bear-zoos. Selecting the best parts and arranging them in the most appealing way is the route to victory. And even if you don't win, your bear-park is going to look amazing. Barenpark is lovely game for families.

And So Many More...

Honestly, I could talk about board games all day, but here are just a few more you might want to consider for your family-Christmas.

Isle of Skye - buying and selling tiles to develop islands in the north of Scotland. This game is far deeper than it looks.

Carcassonne - a classic tile-laying game.

Quadropolis - Sim City as a board game. Simple rules lead to a really delicious 4-player puzzle.

Hanabi - like The Mind, a cooperative game with no talking allowed. Very unusual, but very clever (and cheap!)

Azul - a new game in 2018, Azul is an abstract puzzle game. Lots of player interaction and gorgeous chunky pieces.

Rampunctious - Lovers of puns need to forget Cards Against Humanity. Rampunctious is a tool-kit to come up with your own jokes.

Dare to Dream - three players are kids trying to get to sleep and one player is nightmares trying to wake them up. Very cool theme and unique gameplay.

High Society - a very fast bidding game where, at the end, the player with the least remaining money is eliminated. There are few games like it!

Jaipur - for two-players only, trading spices, cloth, and camels!

Coloretto - very simple but full of tough decisions to make, players are collecting cards of the same colour, but if you take cards of the wrong colour, you start losing points.

Acquire - throw away Monopoly and replace it with this classic instead.

Whitehall Mystery - perfect for a family with older kids. One player is Jack the Ripper and everybody else plays the police trying to catch him!

Smash Up - a crazy card game of robot dinosaurs fighting ninja zombies and all things in between.

Kingdomino - a simple game where players build little kingdoms with different types of terrain. The simple rules mean you can focus on having fun.

Karuba - who would have thought bingo mechanics could be so much fun? Players all get the same tiles and have to use them to path routes for their adventurers to to travel along and find the hidden temples.

My next game release is Tag City - a deluxe roll-and-write game - published by Runes Edition, and released at Essen Spiel 2018. Let's take a trip back in time and I'll show how the game was conceived and developed.

Tag City, published by Runes Editions.

Roll and Write Games

Ever since I played Qwixx,I've been a little bit obsessed with roll-and-write games. The way these work, typically, is that players roll some dice and use those dice to write things onto paper play-sheets. In Qwixx, players are writing a sequence of numbers, which they score points for. It's the genre at its most basic.

There are two things I like most about the genre.

The games are usually very straightforward. Often players have one sheet of paper to write on, so the rules rarely have complexity beyond that - few moving pieces or resources to keep track of. The simplicity in the roll-and-write genre is so refreshing

Choices are permanent! When you make a move in a roll-and-write game, you write your choice on your sheet. You can't take it back, you often can't fix it later. You made a decision and you live with it. I love the tense feeling that this often instils.

When I started making my own roll-and-write games, one thing I wanted to focus on was how players interact. Quite a few roll-and-writes can feel a bit like solitaire, with players not really interacting with one another, so I began toying with ideas of different points of interaction. Enter: Tetris Bingo.

1 Game A Month - "Tetris Bingo"

1 Game A Month (1GAM) is a design challenge (mainly for video games) that encourages participants to make a game each month on a specific theme. Obviously making a game each month is no small feat, so the group encourages participants to keep their games simple and focused, which is perfect for roll-and-write games!

During March 2017, for my local 1GAM group, I decided to make a polyomino game, which some players then called Tetris Bingo!

The first play of Tetris Bingo at Dublin's 1GAM. I love the range of emotions show here: joy, sadness and anger!

As I mentioned I was trying to look at different ways to get players interacting with one another and Tetris Bingo used an I-divide-you-choose mechanic. Essentially, the start player would roll the dice and then allocate the dice to different polyominos - each die can be allocated one of two shapes, depending on its value.

Then all the other players, in order, pick which shape they want, taking the appropriate die. When the choice comes back to the start player they only two shapes remaining to pick from. Then everybody has to use the last unchosen die.

Players draw the shapes the dies are associated with onto their player sheets, which shows a grid, and thus they race to complete features on this grid (rows, columns, and coloured blocks). As the game goes on, players need VERY specific shapes to finish their features and that initial dividing mechanic becomes increasingly powerful and increasingly tense.

An early prototype.

BentoBlocks

The game went down VERY well, but I hated the name Tetris Bingo, so the game was in need of a theme! Because of the way the grid is divided up, I settled on the idea of bento-boxes - a type of Japanese lunch box. And thus BentoBlocks was born.

Changing the theme also inspired me to change the mechanics. I created a new player sheet that reflects the shape of a bento box more closely.

One nice side-effect of this change is that it spiced up the gameplay significantly. Recall that players are trying to complete features - rows, columns, and coloured sections. When all the sections were the same size, there was little incentive to go to a specific area. Now all the sections have different sizes and point values, so players have a tough decision to make - should they go for the larger sections that award more points or go for the smaller sections that are easier to finish, but less rewarding?

Playtesting continued with a local playtest group. We were trying out different Tetris-style shapes, board layouts, and point distributions, but the general gameplay loop had already been locked down.

Testing... lots of testing. Here you can see, I tried objective cards at the request of an interested publisher. It didn't work very well.

Around this time, I also added the option for players to choose a wild shape, but taking significant negative points to do so. This was done in part because I realised that some players are simply bad at Tetris! If this was the case, they needed some way to claw back into a competitive position. It was also the case that sometimes a player would need one very specific shape to finish a section, but other players would conspire to make sure it was never available. Now, players could take any shape they wanted, if they're willing to take some damage to their score. This also allowed me to add small versatile shapes (only three blocks in size), which are normally unavailable but could let a struggling player finish a feature in a pinch.

BentoBlocks was released as a free download for a while, as are many of my games, so I could get more player feedback and improve the experience.

The last version of BentoBlocks.

Ada Lovelace: Consulting Mathematician

While I was trying to make a solitaire version for BentoBlocks, I developed Ada Lovelace: Consulting Mathematician. The game was meant to be a bit of a joke but had a very positive response from players. BentoBlocks is unworkable as a solo game because the player-interaction is so core to the experience, but Ada Lovelace offers a little something else and lets players mess around with polyomino shapes against a timer.

By the way, you can download Ada Lovelace: Consulting Mathematician here. If you like Ada Lovelace: Consulting Mathematician, you'll love Tag City.

Tag City

One fun thing about releasing downloadable games is that you never know what's going to happen to them. Some players made laser-cut copies of BentoBlocks, 3d printing the polyominoes! One player, Stéphane Athimon, really enjoyed the game, offered to translate the rules and just started showing it to publishers on my behalf. You couldn't wish for more enthusiastic fans!

Soon enough, Runes Editions saw BentoBlocks and got in touch. Initially, they weren't interested in roll-and-writes, but liked they way the game had a focus on player interaction. They offered a contract to publish the game and then began developing a retail edition, which would stand head and shoulders above the preceding downloadable version.

I honestly can't remember the order in which changes were made to the game, but Runes were concerned about accessibility and replayability of the game, as well as making it a beautiful and deluxe product.

First of all, they wanted die-cut polyominoes that players could pick up and manipulate, placing them over their player sheets, rotating as flipping them as much as they liked to better visualise how they would fit. And because the shapes are no longer printed on the board, players are free to choose which shapes they use in each game. Six are recommended for the first game, but beyond that, players have a stack of them to choose from each time they play!

A late prototype showing the shape-wheel and die-cut pieces.

Second, Runes wanted to offer different layouts on the player sheets, to encourage different play styles and experiences. This makes the game significantly more competitive! And don't worry, the original BentoBlocks player-boards are in the box too!

Third, Runes wanted to retheme the game to something more exciting. After some back on forth, we settled on a futuristic graffiti battle theme, including hoverboards, a diverse cast, and a graffiti-cat! Grelin came on board to create the stunning visuals in the final game.

This retheme really was a blessing because the new theme helped us to contextualise some of the ideas in the game. The board is now a map of a city and drawing shapes on the map represents racing between different districts to throw up your graffiti tags. Taking a wild-shape is now using a drone to get to hard-to-reach spots. And passing on your turn is now checking your social media - not a good way to spend your time, but in the unlikely event of a tie, the most media-savvy player can snatch the win.

Essen 2018

It's been a long journey for Tag City, but it's been worth it. The final version is gorgeous and smooth to play with tons of tough decisions to make.

If you're going to Essen 2018, visit Hall 4 F106 and I'll teach you how to play! Copies are available to buy during the fair.

Movable Type: Second Edition is the award-winning card game that combines a classic feel with modern rules! With its variety of card-drafting styles and an unusual victory mechanic, the winner won't necessarily be the player with just the best vocabulary - all players are in the running until the final word is played!

Movable Type has now finished production and has been fulfilled to Kickstarter backers. If you missed the Kickstarter campaign and would like a copy, you can buy a copy at my Ecwid store. If you wish to buy through Amazon UK, you can find the game here.

Reviews:

The Hippodice Spieleclub Competition is a yearly award for boardgame design, judged by some of the biggest movers and shakers of the European boardgame industry. Previous winners have included games like Mombasa and Hansa Teutonica.

For the 2018 competition, I submitted a worker-placement game I have developed called Trepanation, and I'm pleased to announce that it won second place in the contest!

Judges playing the Trepanation prototype.

I have yet to post about Trepanation in this blog, preferring to keep it private while it was in early development, so here is a quick run-down.

In the early 19th century, the western world trembled with fear and excitement about new medical advances. The medical horror, Frankenstein, was a bestselling novel and medical shows, in which physicians would electrify corpses, pull teeth, or peddle their “miracle cures”, drew huge crowds.

In Trepanation, players take the role of fraudulent doctors in this era, performing spectacular medical shows for the gullible public, and vying to become the most famous physician.

The game takes place over six days (rounds). At the start of each day, players prepare their schedules by booking time-slots at locations around town. Then the day’s events happen according to these schedules: players gather medicine and equipment, employ accomplices, bribe the police, and perform shows. But not all plans run smooth. Other players will create stock shortages, steal your audience, and snatch up those essential time-slots! Performing shows in related sets grant fame bonuses, as does getting your name in the local newspapers. Grave-robbing during the night damages your reputation, but brings cash! At the end of a busy week, the player who has earned the most fame wins the game.

There are lots of action spaces in this worker placement game because the emphasis is on timing your actions correctly to make the most of your limited resources.

In October 2017, I made my way to the British Library, London, to receive the British Library Lab Award for a Commercial Product. This award is given each year to a product which uses the library's digital resources, and in turn helps expose these resources to a greater audience. As many readers of this blog are aware, much of the artwork in Movable Type uses initial capital woodcuts, as taken from the British Library Digital Archives.

British Library Digital Archive images.

Cards in Movable Type.

Receiving the award and giving a talk about the game's production to a packed auditorium, was an absolute delight - I've been a library nerd all my life, so to be on stage in the British Library was both surreal and wonderful!

Two years ago, I designed and Kickstarted a word-building game called Movable Type, which went on to win the Irish Game Designers' Association (Imirt) award for Best Analogue Game 2016 and the British Library Lab Award for Best Commercial Product. Since then, I have also made and funded a second edition of the game. In doing so, I’ve come to a few realisations about what elements can make a stand-out word game in both the analogue and digital game spaces. This list is by no means authoritative or definitive, but more like a set of prompts to help in your own game-design process.

Before going any further, it’s worth clarifying that I am going to be talking about word-building games, like Scrabble or Alphabear, that require you to use letter cards or tiles to create words. These are distinct from word guessing games, like Codenames or Heads Up, which are games based on inferential skills — I may look at those kind of games in another post.

Word-Building is One Mechanic in a Richer Game

My mantra in game design is “find the fun” — and aside from the satisfaction derived from making a big word, word-building alone is rarely fun. Word-building is usually the least interesting mechanic in a word-building game — players have seen it done so many times before that it rarely excites them. While word-building can serve as an easy point of entry for less-experienced players, most good word-building games go beyond this mechanic, integrating it with something more interesting and strategic.

For the sake of illustration, here are how some particularly good word-building games integrate other mechanics in order to “find the fun”:

Scrabble (and it’s many spin-offs like, Words with Friends), has a basic form of territory control, as players try to hit the bonus spaces on the board, and simultaneously try to deny their opponents the chance to get these same spaces. It also awards players for creating multiple words at once, usually by making a bunch of two-letter words. Having a good vocabulary is important, but being able to control the board is where the interesting strategies lie.

Controlling the Triple Word Score is the key to victory in Scrabble.

Paperback and Dexikon are word-building games which use elements of deck-building games. That means that players have to “buy” more valuable letters to use in the future by playing high value words in earlier rounds. It’s a mechanic that mimics the feel of leveling up in an RPG.

Alphabear has the player uncovering the board as they play, trying to clear connected areas by playing specific tiles before they become locked.

Each tile has a timer and gives access to more territory. Using the right
tile at the right time is important.

My own game, Movable Type, uses two kinds of card-drafting mechanics — a 7 Wonders style pick-and-pass card drafting at the start of each round and tableau drafting at the end of each round. Over time, players are collecting the letters that they need to play killer words later in the game. So there is long term and short term strategising, mixed in with word building.

In WYPS, players are trying to play words so that they can build paths of their own colour between the three edges of the board, making it feel a little like the brilliant abstract game, Tak. It also means there is no scoring in this game, which is refreshingly different.

Konexi implements a Jenga style dexterity element, so long words might score a lot, but may be harder to place onto the developing word tower.

Letter Tycoon has players buying “stocks” and “patents” relating to certain letters, so they get payouts whenever certain letters are used. Rather than just trying to play the best words, players are trying to get rich off their investments.

If you patent a letter in Letter Tycoon, you'll earn
money when other players use it.

Unspeakable Words has a push-your-luck element to it. The longer your word, the better your score, but then you must roll a 20-sided dice — if it shows a value lower than your score, you lose a life. If you lose all five lives, you’re out!

The point is that there needs to be something beyond simple word-building for the fun to latch on to. The word-building is almost always front and centre, but these other elements and mechanics are the spice that brings your game to the next level. Without this spice, your game is only going to appeal to a very thin slice of the gaming population.

Downtime is a Killer

Word-building can take time and player turns in a word-building game have the potential to be very long. A long turn often means things get quite boring for the other players!

When playing paperback Paperback, no matter how much I enjoyed the deck-building mechanic, the amount of downtime really soured me to the experience. I spent about 75% of the game just waiting for my turn.

If simultaneous play is possible, it should be embraced. Otherwise, consider the use of a timer, increasing access to more letters (so words are easier to build), or reducing the stakes for each turn (so playing the bestword is not so important).

Shared or Unique Letters

Having a unique hand letters for each player introduces an element of chance, which can be very painful in a word game — drawing a hand of vowels may well leave the player with no effective moves. Conversely, having a shared pool of letters can create more interactivity and allow player to one-up each other — such as in Boggle or Wordsy. In these games, all players start on equal footing and there’s no way luck can favour one of the other. A lot of games compromise by a having some common letters, to create a reasonably even playing field, in addition to a hand of letters for each player — examples would include Movable Type, Letter Tycoon, and Scrabble.

In Wordsy, everybody plays with the same letters, so there are no unfair draws.

Challenging a Word Should be Possible

This mainly applies to analogue games, where players have to police the legality of words played by one another. First of all, it should be established which kinds of words are allowed in the game — most word games disallow slang and proper nouns. Challenging words which break the rules must be interesting. There should be both a reward for correctly challenging a word (this reward could be in the form of penalising the other player) and a penalty for incorrectly challenging one. If a player can play fake words with impunity, then there isn’t much of a game.

It boggles my mind how anyone enjoys Boggle!

Letter Distribution Matters

In the first edition of Movable Type there are too few vowels, which leads to a lot of tactical play — it’s possible to deny your opponents the letters that they need and it’s important to bank vowels early. This was on purpose, but some players balked at the idea. For the second edition, there is a optional deck of vowels to ensure that each round has vowels among the shared letters. This small change leads to big changes in the tone of the game.

A word game may also needs to address doubled consonants and common letter pairings like “Qu”. Movable Type only gives a limited number of letter cards to each player, so they are allowed to double any card (they could play “Raccoon” with only an R, A, C, O, and N). Players can also use the Q card as either a Q or a Qu. Initially, the design only allowed players to double some specific letters, like the Z, but while I was finding the fun, it became apparent that doubling any letter was a better solution. It gives players more options and leads to fun and tricky plays.

Finally, the quantities of each letter and the score assigned to each letter (if any) affects what other languages the game can be played in. Other languages will have letters that are more prominent and easier to use. Even if a language uses the Roman script, they may have fewer letters — Tagalog, for example, does not use the letter F, V, C, J, Z, or X. Some word games are playable in multiple languages, provided the players remove specific letters before play — both to remove unused letters and even out the distribution. You will most likely find that you need a unique letter distribution for each language you choose to publish your game in.

Weird Fiction is a role-playing game system which I designed to play quick, simple, one-shot scenarios. It's a good choice for players who are either new to role-playing or who want to try something a little quirky and narrative focused.

I get incredibly jealous when I hear stories of RPG groups that have been playing the same campaign for years - taking the time to develop their characters and stories as they delve through mysterious dungeons. But every role playing campaign that I've ever been in has fallen apart after only a handful of sessions. And I know I'm not alone with this experience. Due to real-life commitments, players often find that getting together for regular sessions can simply be too difficult. So I decided to make a game that would cater for groups that can only meet periodically, or maybe even just one time. Weird Fiction has a very simple rule-set and has a way for players to very quickly create characters and jump into the game. Even if that group only meets one time, they can have fleshed out characters, a narrative, and a memorable experience.

Weird Fiction's simplicity all stems from the straightforward skill-check system and its close relation to the streamlined character creation system. In any Weird Fiction RPG session, players don't need to keep track of statistics, skill values, ammo counts, health points, or weight allowances. They only need to keep track of their own character's basic history, experiences, motivations, relationships and skills. These facts about the character are what determines difficulty in any in-game skill-check.

When a player encounters a moment in the game where a skill-check would be necessary - perhaps they are swinging an axe, trying to persuade a non-player character, or trying to leap over a wall - they reach for a pool of six sided dice to see if they succeed or fail in this task. In a default skill check, they will take two dice - one is called a neutral die and one is called a red die. To succeed in the skill check, they need to roll at least one 5 or 6 - and the more they roll the better. Failing to roll a single 5 or 6 means the player has failed. If at that point, the red die shows a 1, they have critically failed. To make their task easier, players can add dice to their rolls if their character is proficient in a task, prepared for a task, or being assisted. It's as simple as saying, "My character, Julie, has experience in acrobatics, so should get an extra die for that." If the game-master agrees and your character sheet shows this history, then the player gets the extra dice, which gives them more chances to roll that 5 or 6.

The game-master can make skill checks more difficult by reducing the number of dice a player is allowed to roll, using a similar system as described above, or they can make the check more risky by substituting neutral dice for red dice. This allows for nuanced skill checks where perhaps an action is not difficult, but is very risky - the player simply rolls a bunch of red dice, so that if they fail their roll, there is a much higher chance of rolling a critical failure.

Character creation typically takes about 5-10 minutes for the whole group. They begin by choosing a character class, which will immediately inform them about a bunch of their skills, and then they answer a series of randomly chosen questions in order to determine their character's past and other experiences. At the end, they establish any relationships they have within the player group and they are good to go.

The first version of Weird Fiction is called Trouble in Shadywood High and is a high-school horror scenario, very much inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The scenario provides a lot of detailed help for the game master, so it's quite possible for them to run the scenario after having only read through the document briefly. Trouble in Shadywood High is absolutely free to download and play, though if you do enjoy if, please do buy me a coffee.